Author: Mark Coughlan

Entertaining ‘exclusive’ video interview with Willie O’Dea by The Limerick Post, below.

He’s certainly allowed talk. He thinks bloggers are widely read in some circles and that they are more representative of the Little Guy. Dunno about that… Continue reading “Limerick Post interview Willie O'Dea”

Two days ago on this site…

I was back in Blanchardstown for the weekend and was informed that Fingal County Council have decided to stop cutting the grass on the big green space near the family home. They’re instead going to slice a big cross through it every once in while so people can walk from one side to the other. Bizarre.

Yesterday’s Herald.

Fingal County Council has devised a scheme aimed at encouraging biodiversity but are now being accused of taking “PR spinning to a new level”.

Under the council’s Growing Places Initiative 2010 they have reduced how often they cut grass in dozens of popular local parks and greens.

However, a local Fianna Fail representative claims that they are running the risk of turning local parks into overgrown rat-infested meadows.

TheStory, bringing you the big stories that matter! First!

There’s some nice work by Treacy Hogan and Paul Melia in The Irish Independent today; an investigation into councils’ financial controls and management gets a two-page spread – 20 and 21.

The main story is headed ‘Broke councils fail to collect millions owed by developers’…

Council finances have collapsed to catastrophic levels and the situation has got so bad that some cannot afford to pay outstanding loans and there is no money to pay for projects already under way.

And it can be revealed:

• Developers owe more than €420m in unpaid levies — but many are not being pursued or prosecuted for the money.
• One developer was undercharged by €1.4m and there is no possibility of getting the money back.
• Expensive public projects are running over budget.
• Millions of euro is owed by businesses in water charges, refuse charges and unpaid rates.
• Some councils have sold land at a profit — but not paid back the loans. Others are stuck with expensive unsold houses and landbanks in negative equity.

The country’s 34 city and county councils have been borrowing more than €10m a week to maintain services, despite being owed hundreds of millions by developers.

You can read the rest here.

The second story is your standard “Outrage as senior civil servants earn LOADZA MUNNAY” piece about the salaries of city and county managers (somewhere between €132,000 and €190,000). This story is overdone, in my opinion. The “everyone got a bonus” line is interesting but unsurprising considering what we’ve heard in months gone by. Anywho… Continue reading “Indo investigation into councils”

Church-gate collections are a great way of getting small donations from large numbers of people. Parties, to my knowledge, run them nationwide once or twice a year. Individual branches also run the odd extra collection here or there for their own purposes, whenever in need of some petty cash.

The declaration threshold for a donation from one person to an individual politician is €126.97. However, it is not required of politicians or parties that they keep figures for the number of individuals who donate to a church-gate collection. A collection could therefore raise several thousand, or hundred thousand, or million, or billion, or… you get my drift, without any donations breaching the threshold (or the donation limits for that matter).

Someone could drop €500 into a bucket and their contribution would be diluted by the people who donate €1 and €2 coins. In this way all documentation, accounting and declarations could be by-passed. While I can’t say that does happen, I can say it can happen under the current system.

Declared donations to all parties are down. Still, it’s interesting to see reports today that Fianna Fáil, despite hideous polling numbers, are doing well at the Church gate. Perhaps the same is being experienced by all parties? Fine Gaelers, done any collections lately? Maybe Joe and Joan Public can’t afford to write cheques exceeding €126.97 and are choosing instead to contribute directly from their pocket. Are the Greens getting the same reaction? Green readers, any experiences?

Anyway, it’s good to know people still care about the political process remain prepared to contribute, if only at the Church gate. Isn’t it?

Also in today’s paper concerning political donations, Michael McDowell saying something or other and getting publicity (to which I will now add, in my own small way)…

At the conference on constitutional reform, which was organised by the UCD school of law, Mr McDowell said that calls by the media for every donation a party receives to be released into the public domain are an attempt by them to secure power.

“Do we want a society where every €100 or €200 contribution needs to be public? Most people don’t want their neighbours knowing they gave money to a party.

Does Mr McDowell not realise that most €200 contributions are already public?

In the US you are required to fill in a form before buying merchandise which goes towards supporting a political campaign. “Wanna buy a mug? Three dollaz and fill in the form.” That’s your $3 donation. Big deal? No.

And yes, there are small towns in America too where gossip spreads like wildfire. Not all of which are clearly red or blue, either.

We really need to get away from the idea that there is some sort of shame or scandal in donating to a political party. Like lobbying, if there was legislation to make it less opaque the public would realise that the activity in itself is not at all inherently corrupting or, by default, an attempt to seek detrimental influence. In fact, both can be extremely positive contributions to democracy.

Questions can be raised when the full picture is not apparent. So why not show the full picture?

… and it’s not pretty…

IT IS no longer a question of whether Ireland will go bust, but when. Unlike Greece, our woes do not stem from government debt, but instead from the government’s open-ended guarantee to cover the losses of the banking system out of its citizens’ wallets.

Even under the most optimistic assumptions about government spending cuts and bank losses, by 2012 Ireland will have a worse ratio of debt to national income than the one that is sinking Greece.

On the face of it, Ireland’s debt position does not appear catastrophic. At the start of the year, Ireland’s government debt was two- thirds of GDP: only half the Greek level. (The State also has financial assets equal to a quarter of GDP, but so do most governments, so we will focus on the total debt.)

Because of the economic collapse here, the Government is adding to this debt quite quickly. However, in contrast to its inept handling of the banking crisis, the Government has taken reasonable steps to bring the deficit under control. If all goes to plan we should be looking at a debt of 85 to 90 per cent of GDP by the end of 2012.

This is quite large for a small economy, but it is manageable. Just about. What will sink us, unfortunately but inevitably, are the huge costs of the bank bailout.

Quite a lot in today’s paper from a TheStory point of view. I’ll be back in the morning with some observations, after some lovely, lovely sleep. That long week was long.

Bizarre; see the fourth box at the side of the main visual element on Fine Gael’s new ‘New Era’ website.

Looks like they paid decent money for the web design this time. So we can rest assured there won’t be serious questions raised about breach of copyright, or intellectual property theft, like there was when they launched their main site last year. Phew.

Simon Coveney is getting a big ol’ push isn’t he? Last observation, bottom left of the main page on the new website; “Fine Gael will create 105.000 new jobs”… 105! Times are a’changing people, crank up the carnival floats!

On Tuesday SIPOC released details of political donations declared by parties in 2009. Between them they disclosed €78,101.99, the lowest figure since the introduction of the disclosure requirement in 1997. On the same day figures for Exchequer funding for parties were also released. €13.6m of taxpayers money went towards supporting parties.

We now know, regards State funding…

Five parties (Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour, Sinn Féin and the Green Party) received funding of €5,438,385 under the Electoral Acts and those five parties along with the Progressive Democrats received €8,164,879 under the Party Leaders Allowance legislation.  The attached table shows the amounts received by qualified political parties for 2009.

In contrast, regards private funding…

Neither of the three main political parties disclosed any donations in 2009, even though this was an election year (European, local and Dáil bye-elections).

The money from the exchequer cannot be used for electoral purposes. It funds research and policy formulation, education, general administration and the co-ordination of party activities. The parties get a share of a pot ‘a gold depending on how many first preference votes they got at the last election. I’ve issues with how these funds are dispersed – it reinforces the status quo to some degree, the big three got 85% of funding this year – but that’s for another post.

Parties must provide SIPOC with an expenditure statement and auditor’s report for the Exchequer funding. These are available for inspection at the SIPOC offices on Lower Leeson Street, I hope to go down and have a goo in the next week or so. A summary is available here. Continue reading “2009 donations (Exchequer and private) to parties”

Peter Boone and Simon Johnson rip into our Government’s economic policy.

[…] The remarkable success of this tax haven [Ireland] means that roughly 20 percent of Irish gross domestic product (G.D.P.) is actually “profit transfers” that raise little tax for Ireland and are owned by foreign companies. Since most of these profits are subject to the tax code, they are accounted for in Ireland where they are lightly taxed; they should not be counted as part of Ireland’s potential tax base. A more robust cross-country comparison would be to examine Ireland’s financial condition ignoring these transfers. This is easy to do: a nation’s gross national product excludes the profits of foreign residents. For most nations, gross national product and G.D.P. are near-identical, but in Ireland they are not. Continue reading “"The Very Bad Luck of the Irish"”

Interesting development over the weekend with Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen both – finally – accepting it wasn’t all the fault of those crafty Lehman Brothers. I meant to get round to a blog post on it earlier but have been snowed under.

It’s fairly little and way too late but… something. Something tiny but something.

Harry McGee has a strong post on the Taoiseach’s speech which I’d encourage you to read. Ahern’s mea cupla hasn’t got quite as much coverage. The Irish Times report by Stephen Collins and Mary Minihan puts it concisely…

Mr Ahern said he agreed with everything in the speech Taoiseach Brian Cowen delivered at Dublin City University on Thursday night.

“Even the self-criticisms in it I accept also, which was mainly the tax incentives,” Mr Ahern said, when asked about the issue at the launch of the Aviva stadium in Dublin.

“We probably should have closed those down a good bit earlier but there were always fierce pressures, there was endless pressures to keep them. There was endless pressures to extend them,” he said.

He said the pressure had come from developers, owners of sites, areas that didn’t have the developments, community councils, politicians and civic society.

The tax incentives he refers to, I’m guessing, are section 23s  on residential property and the tax reliefs on hotel developments which were kept open due to lobbying from developers. The hotel incentives were due to close in 2002 but were held open resulting in a flood of developments in late 2004, the consequence of which is the mess of a hotel and development market we have today.

Ahern’s statements are a pretty clear acceptance that Fianna Fáil donors had massive influence on Government policy during the boom years.

What’s perhaps more startling is Martin Mansergh’s admission on The Saturday View that the influence remains today. Mansergh was on with Fine Gael’s Charlie Flanagan and Mark Hennessey of The Irish Times.

He said… Continue reading “The confessions of Ahern and Cowen”